Midsummer Cordial

Summertime and the living is easy…. well not if you have an allotment it isn’t. There are weeds to pull, seeds still to sow, plants to nurture. But there are times when the sun is high, the insects are humming and a midsummer drowsiness takes over. This is the time to stop and smell the roses or, in my case, the elderflowers. A large tree at the end of the allotment is aglow with creamy, sweet-smelling flowers, which at dusk become almost luminous. Now although I’m not really a hedgerow forager I think the elderflower tree has so much to offer. In the autumn the berries can be mixed in with apples or damsons for crumbles, or made into wine, but it’s the pale starry blossoms that inspire me. So I collect a basket full of sprigs which give off a heady floral scent and I hadn’t noticed this before but the flowers are slightly concave forming a hammock for lots of small insects to nestle. Now although you can buy elderflower cordial I fancy making some of my own and capturing the scent of summer. It couldn’t be easier.

Elderflower cordial

30 heads of elderflowers

1 kg sugar

3 ½ pints of water

7 lemons, sliced

Wash the elderflowers to dislodge any insects. Put the sugar and water in a big saucepan and heat until it just reaches boiling point. Add the lemon slices and stir . Pile in the elderflowers and let them steep in the liquid for 24-36 hours. Stir occasionally, then strain through a muslin. Now pour it into freezer bags and freeze. Now when you want a cool drink scoop a dessertspoon into a glass – it remains soft enough to do this –and add water or some soda water to taste. And at the end of hard day in the garden why not make an elderflower cocktail mixing the cordial with a measure of gin and some soda water. Now all you need is a veranda, a swinging seat and Oh yes, in summertime the living is easy.

Rhubarb, Rhubarb, Rhubarb...

Have you ever wondered what actors say to each other when they quietly chat to each other while the action is going on elsewhere? Of course, traditionally, it’s ‘Rhubarb, Rhubarb, Rhubarb’. I know this practice harks back to the time of Shakespeare, but why choose this particular word for these theatrical mutterings? I suppose it does move the mouth quite emphatically, but can those thespians keep repeating it over and over again while keeping a straight face on stage. It is somehow a comical word, strangely at odds with the plant itself which has a majestic stateliness, it’s large elegant leaves forming a lush canopy hiding stems of the prettiest pink. Our large, mature rhubarb plant in its flowering prime puts me in mind of a Victorian matriarch gathering her dark green skirts about her, with a feathered plume to complete her glory. So, why the comedy name? Well it’s more historical than comical. Marco Polo brought rhubarb to Europe from China and Russia where it grew on the banks of the river Volga; rha comes from the Greek for the River Volga and, intriguingly, this was coupled with barbarium or barbarian which means foreigner. So there you have it  - rhubarb to you.

This exoticism may surprise some people who think rhubarb is really the stalwart of English puddings - rhubarb crumble, rhubarb and custard, rhubarb trifle, rhubarb pie. I’ve made all of these over the last couple of months, but last week I felt I wanted to make something to celebrate the plant’s eastern origins. I certainly didn’t want to do anything too complicated so took a favourite summer dessert and added a little bit of eastern promise.

Rhubarb Fool with Cardamom and Rosewater

This is a traditional fool recipe but I’ve given it the Turkish Delight treatment. The cardamoms subtly perfume the fruit while the rosewater gives it that eastern promise. You can buy rosewater from Middle Eastern shops, don’t be too heavy-handed with it as it is a very concentrated flavour. 

You’ll need:

450 g rhubarb, trimmed and coarsely chopped

175 g soft brown sugar

6 cardamom pods

150 ml double cream

½ teaspoon rosewater

Preheat the oven to gas mark 5 or 190 degrees centigrade. Mix the rhubarb, sugar and a couple of tablespoons of water in an ovenproof dish. Add the cardamoms. Bake for 30-45 minutes or until the fruit is completely soft. Allow to cool completely and then remove the cardamoms. Puree the fruit, adding more sugar if it is too tart. Whip the double cream until just holding peaks stage. Be careful not to overwhip. Now fold this into the puree. Stir in the rosewater before spooning into individual serving pots. Chill before serving. Garnish with a few small rose petals if you have any to hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's in a name?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Mmmm well does it? We rarely stop to think about the names of plants and vegetables, but browsing in a French market last week I became intrigued by the impact of different words for familiar produce. The French call potatoes pommes de terres – apples of the earth, cauliflower – chou fleur, leeks – poireau. Is it because the French have a more gastronomic tradition than us that it all sounds so much more …well poetic. Us British like calling a spade a spade and a potato a spud - take beans for instance – there are broad beans – presumably because they are umm … broad, runner beans because they grow on runners … and I wonder what they call French beans in France? Of course most of the words for basic produce are retained from the Anglo Saxon – with the fancy schmancy language of cooking coming in after the Norman Conquest in 1066. For instance the Anglo Saxon word ‘cow’ when appearing on a menu becomes beef from the French word boeuf. When we want to do something posh with potatoes we do Dauphinoises or Boulangere and often peas magically become petit pois.

Well on the allotment the crop tous jours is guess what ‘purple sprouting broccoli’ – mmm I wonder why they called it that maybe because it’s purple, it’s sprouting and …well it’s broccoli. Good thinking – presumably our forbears thought we’d be stumbling around our vegetable plot not recognizing our crops without these blindingly obvious names.

Now we all know that purple sprouting is delicious just lightly boiled or steamed and served with butter, but with such an abundant crop I decided to search for a different way of cooking it. The Italians have a much loved recipe for this. It’s traditionally made with a pasta called orriechette which translates as little ears and its shape is just right for capturing all the delicious, tangy sauce. Oh and when you deliver it to your expectant family don’t say it’s sprouting broccoli say it’s Cima di Rapa – it does sound good in Italian!

Cima di Rapa with Orriechette Pasta

This is a recipe for four

500 g cima di rapa or purple sprouting broccoli

4-5 tablespoons of oil

1 red onion sliced

2 cloves of garlic,sliced

3 anchovies, roughly chopped

1 glass of white wine

1-2 dried chillies

seasoning

500 g orecchiette pasta  (or you can use other shapes)

a knob of butter

freshly grated Parmesan

Cook the broccoli in slightly salted water. Drain and reserve the cooking water for cooking the pasta.

Saute the onion, garlic and anchovies in the oil. Then turn up the heat and pour in the white wine. Mix in the broccoli and add more oil if it looks dry. Crumble in the dried chillies. Lower the heat and keep warm on a low flame.

Meanwhile bring the reserved water to the boil, cook the pasta and then drain. Add the butter and stir in the sauce. Check the seasoning. Serve with grated Parmesan. 

 

 

Adopt the pace of nature

‘April is the Cruellest Month’ said T.S. Eliot in his poem ‘The Wasteland’. Now a lot of scholars have debated his meaning, but I think I know exactly what he was talking about. Look out of the window on an April morning and see the sun shining brightly. How wonderful you think as you set off in a carefree manner dressed only in the merest whisper of a cardigan. But here’s the thing, a few paces away from the house and you are assailed by spears of icy wind. Oh yes, April is a cruel month tantalizing the impatient with the promise of warm days and long nights, but then teasingly holding back that little bit longer.

Ah but gardeners know this, they are not fooled by false promises, patience is a hard won virtue for horticulturalists . Cultivating anything – whether flowers, fruit or veg – means much waiting. From planting a seed to the flowering or harvesting stage usually takes months with the wise gardener just letting nature takes its course – helping it gently on its way – weeding a bit, feeding a bit and often just watching the sky wishing for sun or rain. It’s no wonder then that gardening is not a hobby taken up by the young; for teenagers instant gratification is just not speedy enough.

I thought about this as I drove to our local nursery to collect asparagus crowns. It’s been a long held ambition to plant an asparagus bed – how wonderful it would be to have fresh spears that can be picked and quickly cooked before the texture and flavour starts depreciating. I exclaim to the helpful man at the garden centre that it was hard to believe that these brown spidery lifeless roots would sprout and grow into flourishing, leafy plants producing such a great delicacy. ‘Hmm’, he says scratching his head laconically, ‘of course you won’t get any this year, only a few not worth mentioning next year – you’ll have to wait for the year after that for your first real crop! Whaat! Is he really saying I’m going to have to wait until 2012 before dribbling butter on to my very own freshly cooked asparagus. Ah well as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Adopt the pace of nature:  her secret is patience’. 

Ye olde weather sayings

I always find those old weather sayings either a bit bossy (never cast a clout before May is out) or incomprehensible (if you are in pain, it will rain) and just plain idiotic (a cow with its tail to the west makes the weather best). Mind you given the fallibility of modern weather forecasting these olde sayings are as good as anything– weren’t we meant to look forward to a ‘barbecue’ summer last year followed by a mild winter? We might as well consult a crystal ball when it comes to long-term weather forecasts. However, the old saying for me, which seems to hold true every year is ‘March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb’. Cast your mind back to the beginning of the month and we were still in the grip of winter – icy winds, sleet and snow and then, almost exactly in the middle of the month, around the time of the equinox the weather eased and the sun shone warmly. The winds were balmy and no longer did I have to venture out in the garb of a yak herder on the Arctic wastes.

I wouldn’t call my self a fair weather gardener, but there are limits. I don’t venture out in the freezing cold and tackle a wet, claggy soil. I confess I have been hiding away these past months – rather like those hibernating mammals - I’ve holed up in a cosy, dimly lit nest  and lived off a store of last year’s produce.

But how nice it is to get out there and feel the heft of a spade again! You can almost feel the plants sighing luxuriously and unfurling in the sunlight. Of course this time is  all about renewal, and on the allotment it is not just about plants, but about renewing gardening friendships also. There are people here who I haven’t seen throughout the winter months – people who I’d see and chat to every day in the summer. So how nice it is to establish all the old links  - how comforting it is to grumble about the usual things – pigeons, slugs, the weather – it’s like settling back into a comfortable old armchair. Of course many of these allotmenteers had got on top of all the jobs I had neglected in the recent months. One of these is pruning  …

Now somehow this is a task that passes me by… until I’m poked in the eye by a wanton twig. It then dawns upon me that aforesaid twig should have been pruned a while ago. I confess I’m a little nervous about pruning – I consult the books and scrutinise the diagrams and then it all goes out of my head the minute I have the pruning shears in my hand. Having over-pruned our blackcurrant bushes one winter resulting in a mass of foliage and no fruit I now try to be cautious. I stand with secateurs at the ready scrutinising each shoot and then rather like Edward Scissorhands I start slowly with a few cuts and then gradually build up to a frenzy of snipping. The end result is that the fruit bushes look as though they have had a very bad haircut; the apple tree has shorn back and sides and then, because I can’t reach very high, a Mohican on top boasting long skyward strands. Ah well, I feel another nonsensical olde worlde saying coming up: “Give a lot, expect a lot and if you don’t get it prune.” Mmmm very helpful.  

Potatoes - exotic fare?

Spring is not quite bursting onto the allotment scene, but taking a few tentative steps. From our point of view it is not the emerging green tendrils or the appearance of hopeful buds that herald the arrival of spring, but the cluttering up of our household surfaces with egg boxes full of chitting potatoes.

What’s this cried a visiting friend? Are you incubating dinosaur eggs? I saw her point – each seed potato snuggled into its individual pod looked as though it might be harbouring a baby velociraptor or maybe even a ninja mutant turtle.

For me, the arrival of the seed potato order ushers in the new gardening year. I know some say you don’t have to bother with all the chitting nonsense, but we all need our seasonal gardening rituals – and this is one of ours.

Potatoes have really had a Renaissance recently. We used to just think of them generically as new potatoes or large whites. But these days we refer to them by their, often very charming, names: Charlotte, Anya, Vivaldi, Mayan Gold, Desiree, Cara. But these varieties are apparently a mere drop in the ocean – there are 5,000 cultivated varieties in the world, 99% descending from a species that originated in a small area of Peru. So this vegetable that we often think of as a bit of a boring adjunct to a more exciting food on the plate is really very exotic. Their origins may be exciting, but for most people potatoes spell comfort. You know all is right with the world when you ladle a mound of creamy potato on your plate or spoon some garlicky Potatoes Dauphinoise to nestle against a lamb chop.

The creator of Winne the Pooh, AA Milne, asserted, "What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow." What he didn’t say though was that if you like them too much you’ll end up with a girth not dissimilar to his famous creation.

purees aren't just for babies

This is a strange time for allotment produce – our stores are dwindling but the spring crops such as purple sprouting have not really come good yet.  This is partly due to our extended winter and partly because the pigeons have treated our crop as an ‘all-you-can eat’ buffet. Ah well all is not lost and we are still eking out our pumpkin and parsnip crop – and have a few leeks still to come. But I’ve had enough of winter – come on sun – come out to play.

Now my daughter and her baby, Alice, came to stay recently. Alice is just being weaned so purees are just the thing for those toothless gums. I rummaged in our vegetable store – otherwise known as the spare bedroom - and cooked up some cubes of butternut squash. I whizzed them with a bit of homemade chicken stock and Alice lapped it up with amazing speed and gusto – that is between blowing raspberries, squidging it all between her hands and splatting it on the wall. I licked one of the many splats that came flying my way and it tasted darn good. Maybe purees are not just for babies. This was later reinforced when we went out to a restaurant a few days ago and my plate arrived with an artistic smear of – would you believe – pureed swede. It was velvety, probably laced with cream and butter and beautifully seasoned.

So this gave me a few ideas and as we have  some pumpkins past their best I cut off the nasty bits and cooked up the rest to make:

Pumpkin Pasta Parcels

If you have ever eaten pumpkin ravioli you’ll know how delicious it is – but also guessed that they are very time consuming to make. This is my cheat’s version.  I’ve left the quantities vague as you can make as much or as little as you like.

You’ll need:

A quantity of cubed pumpkin of squash

Cream – single or double

A few knobs of butter

Sheets of lasagne

Parmesan cheese

Olive oil

Seasoning

In a saucepan, cover the pumpkin or squash cubes with water and cook until tender.

At the same time, put on a large saucepan of lightly salted water to boil. Then add lasagne sheets – 2 per person. Add a glug of olive oil to stop the sheets sticking

 When the pumpkin is tender, drain some of the water, but leave enough liquid to make a puree with a handheld blender or food processor. Now stir in cream and seasoning to taste – it should taste smooth, rich and velvety. Add a few small knobs of butter.

Drain the lasagne sheets.

To assemble put a lasagne sheet on a serving plate and add  a tablespoon or so of pumpkin puree and wrap and tuck the lasagne sheet around it. Grate some parmesan over and drizzle on some olive oil. Do  2 parcels per person. All you need to accompany this is a green salad.